College Romance Prompt #1

Your heroine just won a poetry competition. Her poem’s going to be published in an anthology put out by a big publishing house. Now she has two weeks to prepare for the party, where she hopes to meet an agent, publisher, publicist, or someone who can help her publish a book of poems she’s been working on for ages.

But the bills keep piling up, and she knows most people in publishing come from fairly well-heeled backgrounds. She knows she has to figure out their culture in order to come across as competent and literate. And she has to figure out how to dress: too formal, and she’ll look try-hard; too casual, or casual in the wrong way, and it’ll be obvious that she’s not one of them.

Your hero is a regular at the heroine’s day job who’s actually nice to her. And he seems to come from a “good family.” Can she let him in on her dilemma? Can she befriend him just to get a sense of what code she needs to follow? And what happens if they start to fall in love–even just a little bit?